This 1894 film, one of the earliest produced by Thomas Edison's Black Maria movie studio, features two cats boxing. Obviously it's not actually a video, but it's certainly evidence that even at the dawn of cinema, over a century before YouTube, cats ruled the moving image.

But is this the first recording of a cat in motion? That credit, it seems, goes to Eadweard Muybridge for his animal locomotion studies, which include this 1887 motion study of a cat running, below. Muybridge pioneered motion capture by inventing a setup of multiple cameras in sequence, which recorded continuous movement, frame by frame.